I’m Not With the Band by Sylvia Patterson review – musical memoir

A spread from Smash Hits in its heyday.
Photograph: The Ministry of Pop 2017

Sylvia Patterson used to plaster her bedroom walls with pages from NME and Sounds, then at the zenith of taking themselves deadly seriously, and absorbed the ethos of music as revolution (as well as fun and frenzy). What a blast, then, to find herself, via a desperate stint at hoary Annabel magazine, working as a staffer on Smash Hits, whose relentlessly jokey glossary virtually wrote Eighties pop culture. Patterson’s nostalgia is palpable and she recreates that over-capitalised, “birrova laff” style with joy as she recalls encounters with the biggest music acts in the world as they exposed themselves to the magazine’s particular brand of ridicule in pursuit of publicity. Throughout an illustrious career in music journalism, Patterson has never lost her belief that pop and rock are, or should be, “foamingly important”; she describes the commodification of music into over-controlled “brands” with clarity and regret. Celebratory and elegiac, the book documents the last three and half decades in pop and gives an honest account of an exhilarating and gruelling life. Top read.